Erstwhile bitter rivals Dell and Sun Microsystems are set to announce that Sun's Solaris and OpenSolaris operating systems will be supported in all of Dell's servers. Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell and Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz plan to make the announcement during a joint appearance at the Oracle OpenWorld 2007 conference today.

That is the one thing I do like about Schwartz - he is pragmatic; he isn't hugging religiously to this duelistic idea of the IT world, instead his focus is "how can we maximise both long term and short term shareholder value".

Yes, I do have some issues with the direction in some areas of Sun - I'm sure thats the same for every person out there, no one will be 100% agreement with management, but over all, they are stepping in the right direction. This Dell agreement is the first step.

They've now got their server side all tied up with big OEM vendors on the side of Solaris, now it'll be a matter of getting more software vendors and hardware vendors. From that hopefully Indiana maybe in the future will be an option on Dell laptops next to Ubuntu (maybe that is what they mean by OpenSolaris) and thus the choice for consumers will increase.

With that being said, on the desktop they need more application, especially in the traditional markets which SPARC used to dominate; Matlab and Maple are poplar and available for Solaris SPARC but not Solaris x86, for example.